


pale stains of dust and rust

by oriflamme



Series: stand still stay silent [7]
Category: Stand Still Stay Silent, The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
Genre: Alternate Universe - City of Hunger, Alternate Universe - Murderbot, Artificial Humans, Cybernetics, Gen, Mass Effect Biotics + Ancillary Justice Medical Kits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-10-12 00:23:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20555162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oriflamme/pseuds/oriflamme
Summary: The ScoutUnit is damaged, and that puts an automatic limit on the DefenseUnit's priorities.But that's just life for a DefenseUnit. Most days, Onni feels more like one long, ongoing stress reaction than a person.





	pale stains of dust and rust

**Author's Note:**

> Last year Minna posted [this art](https://twitter.com/hummingfluff/status/986293239769595904?s=20) for City of Hunger, and it consumes me.
> 
> Didn't think we could get more niche than the TF/Raksura fic, but here we are. Thank you Ms Wells for mine life.

The ScoutUnit is damaged, and that puts an automatic limit on the DefenseUnit's priorities.

Sometimes, Onni wishes he could backburner the fear-generated chemicals produced by his organic parts the way he can the public comm feed or performance reliability alerts. Adrenalin and the associated spike of panic in his internal organs aren't helpful; they're a waste byproduct he doesn't have time to purge from his circulatory system. According to self-diagnostics, his long-term cortisol saturation levels – which started ramping up the moment he recognized the IntelUnit in his division as _family_ all those years ago, and have only plateaued since – regularly impact his self-repair and mood.

But that's just life for a DefenseUnit. Most days, he feels more like one long, ongoing stress reaction than a person.

(Technically – legally – none of them are. Organic-based constructs are built sapient on purpose, with increased intelligence and processing power; the anxiety and depression are ironically common side effects. If it doesn't happen to a human, it doesn't count.)

When Lalli gets hurt, Onni knows who's to blame. ScoutUnits come with light armor for a reason. If Onni did his job properly, he would've been there to take the hit instead. Even with Lalli scouting ahead, even over a distance like that. The guilt is another distraction, a sickening tightness in his chest as Onni crouches in the shadow of an immense mechanical rib and waits for the swarm of native fauna to pass by. The ice-encrusted mat of wintermoss growing over the remains of a war wreck provides enough cover once Onni raises a screen.

His defense system slams him with a fresh, panicky wave of proximity alerts as the sun-spiders step delicately over the gap. The tips of their hunting syringes, partially extended from the dark, swollen stalks of their legs, click almost imperceptibly on the metal surface as they swarm over and around the snowed-in wreckage. Onni can only hear it because Lalli has been mutely pushing sensor data to him over the feed for the past hour. Other than that, the sun-spiders pass overhead in silence. The lines of glittering eyes peer out from the seam of their abdomens, some of them three times the height of a standard human.

(Some human probably thought it was amusing to name oversized, dangerously aggressive predators after the shape of their shadows when the sun is overhead. Humans also tend to get eaten by local fauna with depressing regularity when they stray outside the secure zones. Surely there's no connection between those two facts. Onni can feel the strain on his patience just thinking about it.)

Slung over Onni's shoulders, Lalli can't move or lift his head. He's supposed to be saving his strength. Onni already upped the warmth of his upper body as high as it can safely go, in case the ScoutUnit's systems dip enough that the near-zero temperature could cause hypothermia.

[This unit is at minimal functionality, and it is recommended that you discard it,] Lalli sends over the comms. An automated code for severe damage, straight out of the prepackaged programming. They only default to it when injured or otherwise overwhelmed to the point where they're rendered nonverbal.

Onni would be less suspicious if this weren't the third time Lalli forced the message to repeat. That's deliberate. That's - Onni feels sick. The guilt sharpens and twists deeper, a reminder of exactly why Lalli would think he'd -

"Don't be stupid," he says, too harshly, under his breath. His grip tightens on Lalli's good arm, reflexively. "Tell me when they're clear."

The silence that follows is better.

[Clear,] the ScoutUnit sends, subvocal.

Onni lets the defense screen fall, hefts Lalli into a better position, and starts walking again.

-

_Family_, as far as Onni can tell, is what happens when a brand new start-up corporation doesn't pay enough to get adequate software to truly randomize the genetic combinations for the cloned human components. They invested more in questionably-legal, cutting-edge biotic upgrades, instead, to have an advantage over the competition. It probably didn't matter to them if a few units looked oddly alike in the batch - it wasn't like constructs were people. Tuuri couldn't actually be his sister, but she was close enough. It was obvious.

Onni is…ashamed at how long it took before he realized, with Lalli. It's not like they install a manual for how to interpret emotions when you're not really supposed to have them.

Of course he noticed when one ScoutUnit habitually reported back to him after patrol. And when the same scout always chose to dart back to Onni's flank in the middle of a battle to request assistance with a muted ping and a faint pat on one of Onni's armor panels. Onni always gave it, without a thought. The same ScoutUnit that huddled under his arm through bombardment would follow him off the field afterward, and Tuuri would greet them both exuberantly when they returned through security, ready to quiz them about what they'd seen. She called Lalli 'cousin,' which seemed like a typically vague human term she picked up through the IntelUnit feed, and Onni picked it up from her in turn. Lalli certainly never questioned it. There was a discernable resemblance in their facial features, and the three of them gravitated together during off-shift periods, and Onni would've said he was…fond.

Protective instincts are hardcoded into DefenseUnits. It was only Tuuri - too eager, too frustrated by the fact that IntelUnits performed analysis safe inside the company headquarters - who stirred that deep, atypical anxiety in him. Something as minor as one of the CombatUnits frowning at Tuuri's excited chatter in the feed could set it off. The ScoutUnit, on the other hand, was perfectly capable of taking care of himself. On the rare occasions that Lalli _didn't _fall in with Onni during active combat, Onni could file away the sharp spike of worry as unnecessary when Lalli inevitably crept up to him afterward.

This isn't the Corporate Rim, where corporations with stricter surveillance and proprietary interest install governor modules to monitor their constructs 24/7. Off-shift, they were free to interact with whatever units they chose to, within reason. Sometimes the supervisors would laugh amongst themselves about the constructs wandering around and making 'friends,' as if it was a joke. Because humans are, as a general rule, discriminatory idiots.

But the corporate group who built them went defunct pretty soon after the hive-virus started seeping into the inter-corporate conflict zones, five years back. Bot, human, augmented human, construct, local wildlife - it didn't seem to discriminate. The rival corporations pulled out soon after and shut down wormhole access to the star system to prevent it from spreading any further. It was cheaper to leave the few hundred thousand or so non-corporate colonists and militia to fend for themselves against the scattered hives, the increasingly hostile, sometimes infected local fauna, and the elements.

It also left a few thousand constructs at loose ends, free of any humans with command codes who could point them at each other over yet another pointless resource dispute. Written off as lost inventory, probably. Those first few years, the city-state Nälkä needed assistance badly enough that they recruited any willing units with the shaky promise of autonomous rights and personhood. That effort reduced the hive-virus infestation enough that this far north it's negligible. Onni kept Tuuri and Lalli safe with him in a daze of autopilot and desperation, and somehow they survived.

Until the very end.

An IntelUnit shouldn't have been out in the field at all. She should have been somewhere _safe_. But Tuuri kept going out past the hazard markers, bright and chipper as she waved away Onni's concerns. Onni burnt himself out throwing up defense shields at range, setting off energy flares beyond the limits of a DefenseUnit's power capacity in a desperate gamble, and was unconscious when a hive-infected crawler broke through the lines.

He was still comatose in the repair cubicle when the IntelUnit put herself beyond use.

-

When he leaves, the ScoutUnit follows.

Even when Onni ignores him, those first weeks.

Even when Onni has nothing to offer but hard glares when he blocks the faint, hesitant ping in the feed.

Even when Onni snaps, and yells, and throws up a shield to keep the ScoutUnit from tracking him through the dark, frost-rimed gorge.

The last ramshackle signs of civilization give way to the strip-mined craters and leveled mountains of the resource belt, and then again to forests, and the horrible, hollow emptiness Tuuri would call grief finally starts to ease.

It takes him months to realize that he has never been alone - that he's been so lost in the dark pit of his misery that he failed to notice the ScoutUnit curling up at his back every night and slipping away before the DefenseUnit came fully online in the mornings. He scans behind him all the next day, only to realize that the ScoutUnit has been running _ahead _all this time, to make sure the path was safe.

He's not the only one grieving a dead sister. He's not the only one blaming himself for it.

The damage is already done. By the time Onni realizes that he still has family that needs him, Lalli has already accepted that he is worth…less. He flinches away when Onni sits up to greet him that night; it takes days to convince Lalli that he can walk beside Onni as they slowly make their way back to civilization. There is a careful, measured distance between them that Lalli maintains even when Onni tells him that he's welcome in that space. He huddles his shoulders and ducks behind his raised collar, never quite making eye contact, and the skittish silence in the feed when Onni first tries to ping him back on comms is a physical ache.

That shame might never leave him.

-

The nearest shelter is a city-state outpost by a geothermal river. It has medical facilities, according to the most up to date markers on the map overlay. It looks like it's falling apart from a distance, strewn with half-fallen girders from a larger facility and partially snowed in. Most of the corporations abandoned their supply caches and habitat modules all over the place when they left the planet, but the geothermal power could run outposts planetwide for the next millennia.

One of the humans on watch flags them down. The inside of the outpost is almost as rundown as the outside, but it seems to be a minor hub of activity for the area. Onni gets Lalli back on his feet long enough to make it through the security checkpoint. With their collars pulled up and jackets zipped, the dataports embedded in the back of their necks aren't immediately obvious. Long coats and generic winter gear, standard for this planet's climate, hide most of the places where their organic parts meet the inorganic sections. Onni tugs Lalli's hood up over his head as the ScoutUnit sways, and that gets them through the door.

But it's impossible to hide the full extent of how deep Lalli's inorganic components go when a medic stops to do a preliminary exam in the hall. Not when every seam in his right arm cracked wide open on impact, the armor panels popped open to expose the deepwires and struts and the company logo etched into the joints. Only a rough splint holds his lower leg together. The medic's attitude cools strikingly as she takes in the way Lalli's pale back armor forms a neat seam along his thin shoulders and neck, and after she brusquely brushes off Onni's request for a time estimate on how long it'll take to get access to a medical suite, they're left to cool their heels on the bench outside the medical bay proper.

They're not the only ones waiting. But they _are_ left waiting long after everyone else moves on and a fresh set of faces cycle in. His temper worsens as it sinks in that they're being ignored. Deliberately. Onni shucks his coat, not bothering to hide the fact that his arms are broad, heavily augmented prosthetics as well. Lalli is too woozy to notice much now that they're in a secure location; he huddles on the bench, face ashen. He shivers even in the climate-controlled atmosphere. Onni appropriates a shock blanket to drape over the ScoutUnit's hunched head and shoulders, but that's not a substitute for access to _actual medical care_. They could throw him into a construct repair cubicle at this point and Onni would still clamp down on his fraying anger and thank them for the damn privilege. He forces himself to sit beside Lalli as the hours crawl by, sheltering him with an arm as Lalli fades in and out of awareness.

But DefenseUnit programming can only restrain his temper for so long. This isn't a problem that can be solved if he bunkers down with the damaged unit and waits. No one is coming to help them. Onni confronts the next medical officer who sails past them. The human blusters and makes excuses, arms folded impatiently, as though Onni is some out of control, malfunctioning unit making a scene over nothing. But the disgust in his sneer is obvious.

"We've been waiting for almost a day!" Onni yells, giving up on any pretense that this is a rational discussion. He's not sure humans are capable of having those, even on a good day. "My brother needs medical attention. Just -!"

(Humans don't respond well to yelling. It only makes them feel vindicated.)

"It's a construct, isn't it?" From the way the medic's eyes flick down to Onni's arms - obviously he knows exactly what he's saying. He drops the sneer and raises his nose haughtily. "Our medical suites are fully occupied already by those with injuries. It can wait a little longer." Then he strides past Onni, clipping his shoulder as he goes.

It takes everything in Onni's power not to automatically snap a shield up. Instead, he just plants himself and refuses to be moved the way humans always expect another human to. The medical officer stumbles as the arm he used to clip Onni hits the equivalent of a solid metal wall. He grabs his arm, shoots an accusatory look back at Onni, and hurries on.

Which still doesn't get Lalli medical care. But even five minutes away is too long - his defense system protocols are wailing in alarm at leaving the ScoutUnit unguarded. Still seething, Onni drops back on the bench beside Lalli to glower and wait for another medic to venture too close. If he needs to break into one of the medical suites and commandeer it, he's sure he can hold the line long enough to get Lalli in working condition again. Just enough to get them through the next stretch of hive-virus territory. If they can make it to the main city-state perimeter, Nälkä's clinics are less insular. Some are even run by MedicUnits who aren't complete hacks. He can't detect any other constructs on the local feed, and they're the only ones who would pose a real obstacle.

Lalli leans fractionally closer. To any unaugmented humans in the vicinity, the tension and biotic charge gathering around Onni's fists wouldn't be obvious. A scout can't miss it. [Don't. We can just go. I want to leave,] he mumbles in the feed. Tuning down the pain sensors doesn't actually make the damage go away, or make him more coherent when he's running this low.

A bright, agonizingly peppy voice cuts through the tension. "Hi! I, uh, have a medical kit you guys could use?"

Onni blinks, and lets the charge cut out. The medic standing awkwardly before them is - not a medic. He's got the right insignia on the front of his jumpsuit, but he's too new in them, too gawky, with the neck zipped up all the way to cover the implanted interface augment. Human age is difficult to gauge, but he's _young_. He brandishes the medical kit in front of him with both hands, beaming hopefully, and clearly has no idea what to do with it after that point. 

"You're not a medic," Onni says, flatly.

The human giggles and rubs the back of his head, shooting a nervous glance down the hall. "N-Not yet, I mean. But I want to be one! And since no one else seemed to be using this medical kit, they can't complain about me borrowing it, right? No one will even notice it's gone."

He thinks he's being clever. The DefenseUnit pings the local SecuritySystem - it's not actively monitored without a corresponding SecUnit on the premises. But yes, it did notice someone opening a cabinet to 'borrow' a medical kit, and yes, it will report that when the human supervisor next checks in. The freshly chopped hair is a bright copper giveaway. Along with the full name he broadcasts in his public ID on the social media feed.

But if the people here are foolish enough to let an apprentice medic have access like that, Onni doesn't care. It's not his problem. A kit will work fine for their purposes. He grunts and jerks his head in assent, and the baby medic beams again before scrambling to crack the sealed kit open.

Lalli twitches at the sound when he finally succeeds. The baby medic fishes out a diagnostic strip - useless, unless it's keyed for augments at least - and tries to apply it to Lalli's neck. Predictably, Lalli hisses and yanks away, reeling as he tries to use the damaged arm and ping Onni at the same time. "No!" [Code: Assistance. Endangered.]

Onni catches and steadies him. He keeps the sigh subvocal, because it helps keep his other automatic response internal, too. Lalli is not, in fact, endangered. Using system codes like that just prompts Onni's defense system and/or anxiety to try to bounce the baby medic through a wall. "Just give it to me," Onni says, wearily.

"I can do it! I promise!" the baby medic protests. He looks worried now, but still terribly earnest. Spare them from helpful humans.

[Tell him to go away. I don't want him here,] Lalli insists.

The baby medic reaches out again, determined, which is a good way to get hit. Onni holds up a flat hand in front of the human's face before he can get any further. "Don't touch him."

He looks crestfallen. "I just need to -"

"Let me be clear. Touch him again, and _I_ will hit you," Onni clarifies. It's not a threat. Just a statement of a fact. Lalli continues to radiate discomfort, on the verge of distress, and after the past week Onni's not in the mood to test his own patience.

The baby medic sighs. "Oookay then. Sorry." But he passes over the medical kit without arguing more. Onni tosses aside the useless packets and digs until he finds what he needs. The hypothermia internal includes a broad-spectrum boost for shock and overall health. Lalli screws up his face at the taste, but complies.

All the while, Onni is painfully aware of the baby medic…hovering. He watches with frank interest, like packing an augment with repair gel will be on a test he's studying for. Which is better than ogling because they're dangerous half-human constructs. But still irritating. "Will he be okay?" the medic asks, with genuine concern.

It's such a stupid, simple thing. Onni shouldn't feel an emotion about some random human being nice. He's well past that point in his life.

"He'll be fine," he says, curtly, as he finishes sealing the split seams of Lalli's arm in place. It'll hold, and maybe even repair most of the damage, if they don't run into anything worse on their way into the city. If Onni can keep him safe and in one piece, which is apparently a tall order.

He's in the outpost's system to download the latest hazard markers on the map. While he's in there, he quietly deletes SecSystem's incident notification. Baby medic can borrow medical kits without permission another day.

By the time Onni pockets the rest of the internals and snaps the medical kit shut, Lalli is already on his feet. He tests his weight on the bad leg with a flush of life in his face that's been absent for - days. When it holds, a pleased little smile quirks the corner of his mouth.

Onni dumps the medical kit in the human's hands. "Thank you. Don't steal a medical kit again. Next time, someone will notice it's gone," he informs the medic.

Lalli makes a move toward the crowd around the door at the far end of the hall, curious, and Onni has to reel him in before he can dart around and split the leg back open. If there's a large group exiting right now, it's the perfect time to blend in with a crowd and slip out. Lalli can get curious about new people and peer at new things once they're safely in the city. Right now, Onni doesn't trust any human in this building not to throw a fit about Lalli's tendency to stare too long.

"Oh! Thanks!" the baby medic says. He hugs the medical kit to his chest as they shrug their coats on and pull the hoods up. Onni helps Lalli limp toward the door. Then the human bounces and punches the air. "I helped!"

[We're going to the city now?] Lalli sends. Even with Onni steering him, he cranes his neck around to take in all the people by the door. If he detects something urgent about any of them, he'll flag it in the feed. Otherwise, Onni is content to focus on muscling through the crowd without letting any of them make contact. [He's not coming, right?]

Onni doesn't dare look back. If the baby medic is part of this group, he really, _really_ doesn't want to know about it. [To the city,] he agrees, as the outpost door begins to cycle open.


End file.
